aput said, "f-word: I thought the first printed occurrence was in Dunbar's The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (1508): "wan fukkit funling". Of course this was technically in Scots so you could say it wasn't in English, though I claim it as such."

Typo, aput? OED gives as appearance in "about 1503". Of course, if one were to check earlier publications for possible usage, the most-fertile types of publications are perhaps the types to which OED's researchers would not be giving high priority.

How odd that OED says "intr. To copulate. trans.(rarely used with female subject.)To copulate with; to have sexual connection with." I'd disagree with the part I've put in red.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz, October 24, 2004 11:02

Swivel, the noun, is derived from the OE verb swífan 'to couple, have intercourse' > ME swiven. The -l is probably a diminutive suffix. The -en in the verb was the infinitival desinence. A swivel is a coupling device; doesn't seem to great a stretch of the imagination ...

quote:My favorite synonym from Chaucer's time is swiven, related to our word swivel.

Actually, no: my research indicates that they are not precisely synonymous.

As I understand it, older English had two separate transitive verbs, depending on whether the sentence was "He ________s her," or "She ________s him." In the former case the verb would be "to swive"; in the latter case it would be "to quim". [I put the latter in white, on the understanding that in today's british slang it is still used as a noun and is extremely offensive.] The modern verb, of course, can be used in either way, and is not specific to either partner's point of view.

And Cat, I am sorry to spoil your young innocence, but I can assure you, from my personal experience, that passivity is not an invariable female trait!

Amen!

I, too, can attest to that . . . but I believe that Cat is referring to the cultural myth that women are always taken. Now, I think it would be interesting to figure out which cultures promoted that myth and which boldly denounced it.

*******"Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. ~Dalai Lama

quote:Originally posted by jheem: Do you have any references you could point me at?

Here's what I have. They are secondary sources only, since I can't find much Middle English on the net, but at least I have more than one source. Not proof, of course, but suggestive.

1. Apparently John Money noted the distinction in To Quim And To Swive - Linguistic And Coital Parity, Male And Female, 1982 Journal Of Sex Research 18(2):173-176. The article is referenced here (scroll down the left column to item 581). I don't have the full text of that article, but this site explains Money thus:

Sexologist John Money recommends two transitive verb forms for the activity indicated by the noun "coitus" since none exist excepting for the socially unacceptable "fuck." These should be "swive," and "quim," which are obsolete early English. Men would "swive" women, whereas women would "quim" men. Both verb forms for coitus are active and are not indicative of a power imbalance relationship between the sexes engaging in this activity.

2. In the discussion here (continuing here) between Rueckert, McKenna, Waugh (respectively indicated by black, blue and red type below), the last two gents seem to seem to take the same position. The relevant parts, amid a morass of much more, are:

"Not that it shockes me that much, but in Dutch "kutmusic", "kutmuziek", means very, very lousy music, "kut" being the most dirty word for the female genital organ..." [and later] "PS No English word comes anywhere close to the Dutch word for the actual deed ...""Really? Neither to quim nor to swive?""both of which are valid english words. even if swive is quite obsolete except in dialect. though they don't mean the same thing in english.""Yes. Both valid, both archaic as verbs. In the sense that each verb is gender specific, you are correct to distinguish difference between them - but they do indeed "mean" to the same thing (application of one or the other differ depends upon who's doing the thing)."

These should be "swive," and "quim," which are obsolete early English. Men would "swive" women, whereas women would "quim" men. Both verb forms for coitus are active and are not indicative of a power imbalance relationship between the sexes engaging in this activity.

Thanks, wordnerd, for the references. It is not clear to me from the above quote that what Money is doing is describing how swive and quim (which is a noun for the female pudend) were used rather than his suggested normative usage. I'll try to find the article and get back to you.

Partridge suggests that quimming for sexual intercourse is a 19th century usage. Hardly Middle English.

I looked in my Old English dictionary and find that swifan meant 'to come to course' and our word swift is from the past particple. No mention of its sexual use. Nothing sexual under cwim either, except that it's a variation of comen whence our to come; it's related to Skt gam. 'to go', Latin venio 'to come', and Gothic qiman 'to come'. The use of the verb for come as a synonym for the climax of sexual intercourse is found in Hittite (don't have the word at hand).

Anyway, I'm still sceptical, but will reserve further opinion until I've read Money's article.

IMHO, words aren't "dirty" unless they are so in the minds of those who proscribe them, and then they're only dirty to them. Hey, if Dick Cheney can tell someone to "fuck off," we've come (pun not intended) a long way!

Is the word "quiff" related at all to "quim?" One meaning of "quiff" is "a woman regarded as promiscuous," though the AHD says the etymology is unknown. My logophile friend says that "quiff" used to be one of the less common synonyms for female pudenda. He encountered it in a novel (though he couldn't remember which one) with a British high society woman who had to reconcile mild nymphomania with her ultra proper pose. Her name was 'Lady Quivering-Quiff'.

I wasn't saying that a distinction lexically between men doing it and women doing it cannot be possible. (In fact, we've gone over how Latin distinguishes between active and passive oral sex lexically.) I just thought that Money was suggesting a new word usage, not reporting the meanings of a couple of Middle English words for sexual intercourse. It would probably mean a trip to the University library to look at a large Middle English dictionary or some concordances of Middle English literature.

arnie said, "This is the perennial bugbear of forums and newsgroups. Someone starts a serious thread and it attracts a number of light-hearted posts, distracting attention from the more serious offerings."

Well, I thought it this an interesting topic. I've found an earlier cite, but why bother?

As I posted in Community, I think we all need to take a deep breath. I absolutely think this was an excellent thread with much good knowledge. In fact, someone who posts on another word board that is much larger than this told me this was one of the best discussions on words he has seen. Yet, I also think that we are here, as you say CW, to have fun too.

Right now, though, I sense that people are getting a little frayed and feelings are getting hurt. So...can we please move on? As always, concerns about the board, at least at first, are much better brought up privately.

Yes, indeed. I remember asking one of my high school English teachers if he had a copy of Beowulf in Old English that I could borrow. He was sorry but he didn't. He did loan me his copy of Chaucer (in Middle English) and pointed me at the Reeve's Tale and the Miller's Tale. The next day we discussed the literary versus the naughty bits. Years later in college I took a Chaucer class from an emeritus professor. We each got a tale to study (I got the Knight's Tale). We'd read out loud in class from the selected tale for a while, then dicuss it. What a fun class that was. The professor, one of the first PhDs in folklore, told us the first day of class: "Look, I don't get paid for teaching this class. I do it because I enjoy Chaucer. If you're not going to put any effort into this, drop it." It was so refreshing. Later that summer he sent each of us a post card from a different pub along the way between London and Canturbury.

I was fortunate enough to have several professors with that kind of dedication and love of their subjects! I had one class in undergrad that met at a local (well, close to local, for this area) bar & grill every third class or so. For a "dry" school, this was quite rebellious! WooHOO! The funniest thing is that hardly any of us drank - we just spent our time eating deep fried foods and talking about international manners.

*******"Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. ~Dalai Lama

Continuing: OED's first cite for the f-word is dated 1503. However, an undated manuscript believed to be from a bit earlier (1450-1500) contains both that word and swive.

They are written in code, but the code is easy to crack. The scribe just replaced each letter with the immediately-following letter of the alphabet; you decode it by reversing the procedure. Here is the text, in case those who know Latin spot something I miss, with the coded parts in red. (The old letters thorn and yogh are not available in Wordcraft's font, so I've used Þ and ž)

[Side note: if you want to decode this, remember that at that time, i and j were thought of as the same letter, just written in two different styles. So in their alphabet, each of those letters is preceded by h and followed by k. Similarly u and v were two forms of the same letter, with the additional complication there was no w (it was written uu). Hence in their alphabet, the letters u or v are preceded by t and followed by x.]

The phrases thus decode to state that the friars fuccant wivvis of Heli ("f*ck the wives of Heli") and swivit mennis wivis.

It's been argued that this code is so very easy to spot as being a code, and so very easy to decipher, that it couldn't have been intended to hide the words. It was more like making an in-joke, sort of like writing "f__k", knowing full well that everyone will know what you mean.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz, November 10, 2004 07:39

Modern folk song heard on the radio. The woman who sings is presumably a folk-singer from the 60's or 70's, now matured to become a mother befuddled by her children. Her plaint, sung in a high thin voice, has this chorus.

We sit down, to have a chat,It's f-word this, and f-word that.I can't control how you young people talk to one another.But I don't want to hear you use the f-word with your mother.